The decentralized indexing protocol, The Graph, experienced a technical failure lasting approximately 11 consecutive hours, which caused its services to be interrupted and paralyzed for this period of time.
In a article posted by Yaniv Tal, co-founder of The Graph, said that due to the growing demand from users for the platform's services, they began to experience outages that slowed down processes and prevented more than 500 requests from failing. He noted that the most affected services on The Graph were related to front-end applications, especially DeFi, as well as some smart contracts (smart contracts) even though users could still interact with them.
For almost 11 consecutive hours, there were interruptions in The Graph service, and after they were corrected, approximately 30 minutes later, another interruption in the platform's services occurred again; only this time, luckily, the technical team was available and was able to solve the problem in a shorter period of time.
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What is The Graph?
The Graph is a protocol decentralized indexing for Web3 based Ethereum which allows users to perform queries on multiple networks, block chains, databases and even in InterPlanetary File System (IPFS – Interplanetary File System), which is a hypermedia protocol peer to peer (p2p) which allows the web to be much faster, safer and more open.
The goal of The Graph is to enable users to design, build, and enable internet-ready applications that run in a completely decentralized manner on a public infrastructure. Through The Graph, users have the ability to create and publish open APIs that make data highly accessible to everyone. As outlined on The GRaph website, subgraphs can be composed into a global graph with all the world's public information, then this data can be transformed, organized, and shared across applications so that anyone and any user can query it quickly and easily with just a few keystrokes.
Details of the errors presented on the platform
The Graph has seen incredible growth in the volume of daily visits and queries on the platform. According to Yaniv Tal, this volume has grown from around 25 million queries per day to over 45 million, an 80% increase in just a few days.
Tal explains that this fierce growth is thanks to the boom that DeFi ecosystems are having today, since recently the so-called "yield farming"or high-yield agriculture, which is applied to the cryptoassets as a way to actively and passively generate income through these protocols. Although it is a fairly new concept within the crypto space, the truth is that yield farming is managing to attract hundreds of thousands of followers in a short time, and it is estimated that this was the cause of the collapse that The Graph recently presented.
According to Tal, The Graph server is always operating at 50% of its capacity and does not require more than this potential; while on the day of the crash, it was necessary for the server to use 100% of its capacity due to the high demand of requests, which caused the platform to fail.
While Tal acknowledged that the development team behind The Graph has projected the platform's growth, he noted that the number of requests received for that day exceeded all of their projections and estimates.
“While we always planned for growth, the resources required to support the consultations were greater than our projections.”
Tal also pointed out that a large series of complex queries also contributed to the momentary collapse of services. Although GraphQL It is extremely flexible and allows for custom queries to be built, database administrators must ensure that they are able to execute all of these queries efficiently.
Other DeFi protocols may present infrastructure issues
The service outage suffered by The Graph platform also caused problems and failures in other common applications used in DeFi such as AaveOn its official Twitter account, Aave noted that they were experiencing technical issues in the front-end services, but that the team was already working on the problem to find a prompt solution.
Aave also noted that at that time the protocol was still accessible and that they were using alternative services such as ParaSwap o FuruCombo.
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